1.
nce a year they come,
swirling hot and dry into your heart, for
five days you can't sleep, eat, or love, you yell for no apparent reason
until glasses shatter
behind cabinets, you can't sleep, and when you do, you
can't dream, for five days, five nights they rip through the trees,
tearing leaves and lovers apart, swirling the green and dark green, the
deep sweet purple of hearts into a lunatic swirl, where all you can do
is hold tight with
one hand whatever is closest, a bed post, your dear
friend. Until one night, you find yourself naked and crying, your
lover's gone with the
car, it's quiet, and they've left, the Santa Ana winds, cackling
hoarsely across the hills
to sleep, sated, in the desert.
I'd never been to LA. And I'd never seen two lovers so ragingly in love,
kissing in restaurants, she pulling a breast from her blouse, her brown
nipple flickering in the candle light, he singing with her in the car,
wearing her panties on his head, the windows open, wide open, too
enticing, really. They had forgotten what time of the year it was.
It was late when I arrived. We sat on a steep hill, where an arthritic
tree wearing nothing but orange flowers struggled up the path to the
dining room, where we ate with glass walls around us, overlooking a
lighted pool, LA twinkling in the valley below. Wineglasses were
shattering in the house next door, but we didn't hear them, Albanini was
being played
and we were eating our salad by candlelight, toasted
spaghetti sticks poking out of the spinach like a Japanese hairdo.
I had never met him, or his daughter. Six year old Jessica who told me
in deep
earnest that she was in fact half cat, couldn't wait until her
mother got her some cat powder to get rid of the fleas. The winds were
picking up and she was getting restless, kept scratching her ankles.
Paul put her to
bed and didn't hear the rapping against the glass because he was reading
her a story.
I guess the old tree had made it to the house,
one crooked finger knuckling against the glass, rapping against it, but
too late. We had put the dishes away and gone outside, around, to the
other side of the house, where we had taken off our clothes, Krystyna
and I, and had
jumped into the pool.
When Paul found us, two nymphs floating on a huge plastic lily pad,
waves were
rippling quickly across the pool. He undressed and dove between us,
hello, I thought, my skin touching his, how lovely to meet you. The moon
was being blown across the sky. We floated and watched as stars unloosed
themselves and dropped silently into the pool around us.
In the morning two coyotes wait to be fed. Dropped here in this garden,
where birds and squirrels and hummingbirds hop about, where orange and
pink flowers explode from the trees like fireworks in slow motion.
Does Paul remember the Santa Ana winds are coming? He drives Jessica far
away to be with her mother.
The palm trees are swishing. The palm trees are swishing.
2.
It's hard to breathe. The wind snaps in hot, dry spurts. Our lungs, hard
and tight, are
like raisins.
Krystyna tells me -- as we're running on her mountain-- the yellow
desert mountain behind her house-- when she first moved to LA, she used
to run up
this hill every day with one thought in her mind:
I want to fall in love, be in a mo-vie, and ive in one of those houses
with a pool.
3.
I hated LA until I went to visit. Sunny day after sunny day, they walk
around in paradise, cobalt sky and soft orange flowers, the Garden of
God, where He grows them and plucks them, golden and ripe, the people of
LA. You can smell the perfume of Heaven in the ocean, wave after lapping
wave, amassing all of these people, gently, sweetly, until one day a
giant wave will swallow them, rolling like one salty blue carpet, the
ocean will usher them home, the children of God, the tree children and
squirrel children, and the bunches and bunches of flowers. When LA slips
into the ocean, those of us in Arizona strolling the beach will hear
fireworks and laughter on the horizon. Heaven will be stuffed with
colors.
Plates are rattling. They are drying on the drying rack, and they are
rattling.
4.
My heart leaps like a fish, on Malibu Beach, as the three of us sit in
a caf overlooking
the sea at sunset. Spectacular. Palm trees on the cliff
are swaddled in golden light, and the mounds of black rock near the
shore look like a
family of whales floating in the ocean. The sun cracks open
like an egg and spills slowly over the sea. The family of rocks,
gathered for their
evening meal, wait... open their black throats, swallow the
last drop of sun. We sip our wine as we watch the sky turn into wine. We
eat the fruits of the sea on a pizza, talk about sex, as the moon slides
like a thumbnail up into our sky.
The people at the next table give us dirty looks, as we lick the
cheesecake from our forks, and chat about sopping wet pussies and big
tit, small tit, tit tit tit. Krystyna wants me to lean over and kiss her
on the mouth-- just to annoy our neighbors.
As the stars are sprinkling into the ocean, I say that if I die tomorrow
on the plane I won't be sad. There is a great silence.
And they burst out laughing.
5.
She dug herself a little hole. A little potty in the sand, Krystyna sat
her tiny buns down in it and took a pee. She didn't want to pee in the
ocean and get wet, swim in the swirling seaweed stew, like Paul and me,
the brave ones, brave, that is, until I got pummeled by a nasty little
wave.
I got thrown onto the hard sandy floor, onto my head, bone ground into
sand, hair and teeth into a fine white grit, with her great blue pestar,
she pulverized me into her mortal till I was not more than paste, salted
and rolled to shore by the white hands of froth.
I was so shook up and insulted I left, I left and walked up on the sand
to join Krystyna, who had covered up her pee hole, and was now eating an
apple.
Paul walked up from the ocean, bedecked in seaweed, isn't he sweet, she
said, isn't
he just like a little boy?
The Pacific is little sister to the Atlantic. She's impatient, she slaps
and sucks, sucks
everything like a hard piece of candy, she pops it out
of her mouth, and sucks it back in, she can't wait to swallow it, she's
dying to chew it
and swallow it, the Pacific wants her coast, she wants
it, she wants her shoreline, she's restless and young , and she's got a
sweet, hard
tooth.
6.
All of their money went into the movie. Paul, uptight, drove to town
this morning to sell
his Rolex watch.
Last night they made up, fought, and again tonight, they fought in the
middle of the night. I thought it was over when Paul came naked to the
door and stuck his pinkie finger out to her. She lifted her pinkie from
across the room, but neither moved from his place. Trees were bending at
the waist outside, the small white flowers fluttering like crazy, and
with a sigh, Krystyna got up from her chair, moved towards him, her
pinkie up. But she stopped before she got to the door. He would have to
move into the room to meet her. And he did. They locked pinkies and
hugged. I thought I caught the female coyote watching this. But it was a
mirage.
This morning she's screaming, "let me go, you're hurting me!" She's
shrieking and I can't see what's going on because I'm waiting beside the
car, all of my bags hanging off of my shoulders.
Has he completely lost his fucking mind? I imagine her being beaten,
being thrown into furniture, being shattered to bits in that lunatic
house.
I wait for him to throw her against the hard stone floor and smack her
on the head until
her eyes turn white like milk.
Krystyna comes to the car panting and heaving and crying. Tonight she
will pack her bags and leave him. She will go to Spain. He will smash a
blue glass against the kitchen floor.
She can't take it anymore, she says. She drives like a lunatic, down the
twisted road,
telling me how he is driving her insane.
7.
The last I remember of this trip is the garden of oz. A yellow path
garnished with roses, leads to a grove of mosaics: thousands of pieces
of glass,
porcelain, jewels, small toys, colorful broken up plates, and
hanging things. A crystal garden and a garden of angels, a wind
sculpture to celebrate
the wind, a flock of origami birds dangling from a purple
pole, and, at the top of the steep, glittering garden, a dream catcher.
Things are written on plates, like "peace begins in a garden" and "take
only from this garden what you give back to it" and "sitting place for
lost souls". We sat
there.
Behind giant leaves, a white stone angel leaned over to hush us up,
looking nearly into our eyes with his own two inlaid rubies.
As the last wisps of the Santa Ana Winds whistled through the dream
catcher, Krystyna, crying softly, said if she were to live her life over
again, she would...
sing as if she'd never been heard
dance as if no one could see her,
love as if she'd never been hurt.
